How these 3 luxury brands are using social media to enhance business

YouTube’s own advertiser channel demonstrates the vast usage of social media and content marketing for luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Burberry, featuring product reviews and influencer-based content.

Social media has evolved tremendously across the world over the last few years. Luxury brands once shied away from it but are now more open to the opportunities available to them today. There have been many examples of great luxury brands using social media to excite, entertain, and engage customers by inviting them to their own world of ecstasy.

Image : shutterstock

A great example of this can be seen by the eight million views on this BuzzFeed video reviewing expensive shoes. Now, of the eight million viewers, possibly 200 would ever consider buying a 25,000 USD pair of shoes, but for the brand that’s featured in the video it’s free PR and actual sales

Apart from the one-offs and the content marketing scope of online marketing, social media plays an important role. Through social media, brands can utilize the same tools they have used for ages but extend further into the aspirational and experiential basis of marketing.

According to a recent ASSOCHAM study, high-income group consumers spend over 40 percent of their monthly income on luxury brands, whereas the middle-income group (MIG) consumers spend eight to 10 percent on luxury products.”

The following are three luxury brands that are leveraging the power of social media to enhance their business:

Ferrari

Many would wonder why a legendary brand like Ferrari needs to be on social media. After all, only a handful of their customers are on social media. Well, Ferrari doesn’t need a single dime from its 16 million Facebook fans today. However, a minority of these fans will eventually end up buying one or influencing their peers to purchase one in the future. That’s the incentive for Ferrari to be on social media. With its fans already posting millions of pictures on these platforms, Ferrari had to be present on social to dictate its own story through its own portal. Otherwise, brand liquidity and image persistency might have decreased its overall value. This is the challenge for luxury brands these days. They need to be everywhere while simultaneously being exclusive.

Dior

With 14 million fans on Facebook, Dior is translating its offline strategy into an online one. Regularly featuring models and Instagram celebrities, the brand aims to target the mainstream audience to enter the Dior family with an entry level product, while pivoting upwards year over year. That’s the sales tactic for luxury brands like Dior – making you taste quality with its tiny expensive bottles, and then making you a partner for life through its exclusivity and taste. After all, if Kendall Jenner influences you and 80 million others, then Dior will leverage her for its own brand.

In fact, one of its core strategies to make social work for it is to give a first look of its new collections (and show the painstaking amount of work involved) through its own fan pages. This ensures that fans are really treated like fans and not just a statistic or a number.

Harley Davidson

Harley Davidson doesn’t believe in discounts or sales. Instead, the company focuses on community and collaboration. In India it has a strong paid membership brewing in the local markets for people to become a family of the Harley Davidson group. On social media, these members often talk about their passion and regularly meet up both offline and online. They collaborate with bike magazines, online bike influencers, and hog enthusiasts to bolster their brand in the online space. For Harley, the cost of acquisition is significantly lower when it comes to having a great online experience rather than a store or an in-person communicator. Going away from the exclusivity tag, they are more available than any of their competitors and are more open to collaboration for their community then most luxury brands.

Building a brand online is hard work. Luxury brands must create a fine line between balancing exposure to exclusivity. By limiting its presence to its fans, it makes a significant impact in the lives of its customers by being fan-first and creating value in terms of online experience. By providing a platform for video and audio content to please an audience, social media is a great tool for including new members into the brand’s legacy.